Nine Abstract Artists reveals three values held by Alloway and other members of the IG in those years. First, as we have seen, was the implacable opposition to British Romanticism of the 1940s and 1950s— Alloway felt next to nothing was salvageable from that “tired” tradition. Second, he was liable to take the critical aspect of criticism very seriously. An interest in criticism being “descriptive” did not occur until a different decade in a different place. Some of the artists criticized by Alloway were angered by his comments. The St Ives-based painter Patrick Heron referred to what he termed “Alloway's anti-St Ives campaign.” Heron himself was stung by Alloway's judgement that, “from Sam Francis [Heron] has soaked up some superficial stains that makes his paintings look like designs for splashy textiles…” Heron looked back on Alloway as “the arch enemy of me and of all our generation…” He was guilty of “fantastic and lasting damage to my generation. We were really pushed right under the carpet for twenty years…” It is apparent to anyone who has read a modicum of his criticism that he did not become a critic primarily to win friends (although he may have been interested in influencing people). Alloway was renowned for not suffering fools gladly and acknowledged as much in an interview when he admitted that “When I was in England, I was surrounded by what I considered to be mild idiots! So I tried to write a sort of art criticism that opposed that. I wrote quite aggressively and in strong opposition to my colleagues…”

The third point of Alloway's values we can identify in Nine Abstract Artists is his opposition to idealism and the absolute. Herbert Read is quoted as observing that a work of art can express a transcendent, universal, and timeless quality, and “must of necessity be far removed from the mundane world of actual appearances.” Alloway spells out the implication: “There the platonic drift of abstract aesthetic is summed up: geometry is the means to a high world.” Alloway consistently opposed this linkage. In 1954, “These obstinate absolutes… obtrude constantly,” the legacy of the abstract art of the pioneering generation of the 1910s and early 1920s, and succeeding generations up to the Second World War, such as Unit One and Circle.